Expecting a bag skate? Not the case as McLellan puts priority on improvement, not punishment

The Sharks took the ice at 9:30 a.m., a half hour earlier than planned because the rink in suburban Farmer’s Branch was available. And for the next 30 minutes, it was one series of uptempo drills after another, several of them of the “compete” variety.

But there was none of the usual chatter and the only voice you could hear was Todd McLellan’s very matter of factly directing his players where he wanted them and letting them know what he wanted to see.

Then it was over. No skating drills till players were exhausted, bent over at the waist as they were last season in Calgary after another bad loss. No practicing without pucks.

“For anybody that thought we would show up and there’d be 90 minutes of skating up and down, maybe it’s what we need in the moment but we sure don’t need it in the long run,” McLellan said afterward. “We play three games in four nights this week, we travel all over the country this trip and we’re near the back end of the season.

“We still need to make decisions based on wins and losses and what’s best for the team,” he added. “What was best for the team is what we did today.”

The previously unscheduled practice after last night’s 8-2 drubbing in Dallas was about getting better, the coach said, not about punishment.

At one point McLellan did talk to the players about what went wrong on Brendan Morrow’s first goal, but the general idea was to look ahead to Vancouver rather than re-live the mistakes against the Stars.

So does McLellan think last night’s game was as low as it can go?

“You know, you’d like to think it is, but we have to work ourselves out of this and the key in that is working,” he said. “It’s something that we’d gone through earlier in the year, that we’ve gone through in the past, so there’s no reason we can’t right now.

“As long as we learn from it collectively, we’ll be better,” he added. “But if we don’t work our way out, if we try to short-cut our way out, we’ll stay in it a lot longer than we should.”

McLellan did juggle his lines, sticking with some combinations he had together late in the game against Dallas. Here’s what it looked like:

Clowe-Pavelski-Thornton

Heatley-Marleau-Setoguchi

McGinn-Malhotra-Mitchell

Ortmeyer-Nichol-Staubitz

“We mixed things around a little bit,” McLellan said. “We’ll talk about it on the plane and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

This has been decided: Evgeni Nabokov is back in the nets.

****I did talk with more players today, but don’t have the time to get into that now. Had to reschedule my flight to Vancouver and that means I need to file for the print edition before I leave Dallas, so I need to get cramming on that.

****Turns out my last post may have misstated the situation in the Sharks locker room last night. I wrote that I didn’t see Joe Thornton or Patrick Marleau there, but I’ve been advised both were in the room when it was opened to the media. I made a bee line for Rob Blake’s cubicle and while I was talking with him, Thornton and Marleau left.

David Pollak

David Pollak has been following the NHL forever and at the Mercury News as an editor or reporter since 1987. For almost a decade he wrote about the Sharks as the paper's Fan in the Stands before joining the sports department in 2001. He became the Sharks beat writer before the 2007-08 season and began this blog at that time. You can also follow him on Twitter at @PollakOnSharks.